We can
illuminate the status and implications of moral side con­straints
by considering living beings for whom such stringent side
constraints (or any at all) usually are not considered
appropriate: namely, nonhuman animals. Are there any limits to
what we may do to animals? Have animals the moral status of mere
objects? Do some purposes fail to entitle us to impose
great costs on animals? What entitles us to use them at all?

Animals
count for something. Some higher animals, at least, ought to be
given some weight in people's deliberations about what to do. It
is difficult to prove this. (It is also difficult to prove
that
people count for something!) We first shall adduce particular
examples, and then arguments. If you felt like snapping your
fingers, perhaps to the beat of some music, and you knew that by
some strange causal connection your snapping your fingers would
cause 10,000 contented, unowned cows to die after great pain and
suffering, or even painlessly and instantaneously, would it be
per­fectly all right to snap your fingers? Is there some reason
why it would be morally wrong to do so?

Some say
people should not do so because such acts brutalize them and make
them more likely to take the lives of persons, solely for
pleasure. These acts that are morally unobjectionable in
them­selves, they say, have an undesirable moral spillover.
(Things then would be different if there were no possibility of
such spillover— for example, for the person who knows himself to
be the last per­son on earth.) But why should there be such
a spillover? If it is, in itself, perfectly all right to do
anything at all to animals for any reason whatsoever, then
provided a person realizes the clear line between animals and
persons and keeps it in mind as he acts, why should killing
animals tend to brutalize him and make him more likely to harm or
kill persons? Do butchers commit more murders? (Than other persons
who have knives around?) If I enjoy hitting a baseball squarely
with a bat, does this significantly increase the danger of my
doing the same to someone's head? Am I not capable of
understanding that people differ from baseballs, and doesn't this
understanding stop the spillover? Why should things be different
in the case of animals? To be sure, it is an empirical question
whether spillover does take place or not; but there is a
puzzle as to why it should, at least among readers of this essay,
sophisticated people who are capable of drawing distinctions and
differentially acting upon them.

If some
animals count for something, which animals count, how much do they
count, and how can this be determined? Suppose (as I believe the
evidence supports) that eating animals is not necessary for
health and is not less expensive than alternate equally
healthy diets available to people in the United States. The gain,
then, from the eating of animals is pleasures of the palate,
gustatory delights, varied tastes. I would not claim that these
are not truly pleasant, delightful, and interesting. The question
is: do they, or rather does the marginal addition in them gained
by eating animals rather than only nonanimals, outweigh the
moral weight to be given to animals' lives and pain? Given that
animals are to count for something, is the extra
gain obtained by eating them rather than nonanimal products
greater than the moral cost? How might these questions be decided?

We might try
looking at comparable cases, extending whatever judgments we make
on those cases to the one before us. For ex­ample, we might look
at the case of hunting, where I assume that it's not all right to
hunt and kill animals merely for the fun of it. Is hunting a
special case, because its object and what provides the fun
is the chasing and maiming and death of animals? Suppose then that
I enjoy swinging a baseball bat. It happens that in front of the
only place to swing it stands a cow. Swinging the bat
unfor­tunately would involve smashing the cow's head. But I
wouldn't get fun from doing that; the pleasure comes from
exercising my muscles, swinging well, and so on. It's unfortunate
that as a side effect (not a means) of my doing this, the animal's
skull gets smashed. To be sure, I could forego swinging the bat,
and instead bend down and touch my toes or do some other exercise.
But this wouldn't be as enjoyable as swinging the bat; I won't get
as much fun, pleasure, or delight out of it. So the question is:
would it be all right for me to swing the bat in order to get the
extra pleasure of swinging it as compared to the best
available alternative activity that does not involve harming the
animal? Suppose that it is not merely a question of foregoing
today's special pleasures of bat swinging; suppose that each day
the same situation arises with a different animal. Is there some
principle that would allow killing and eating animals for the
additional pleasure this brings, yet would not allow swinging the
bat for the extra pleasure it brings? What could that principle be
like? (Is this a better parallel to eat­ing meat? The animal is
killed to get a bone out of which to make the best sort of bat to
use; bats made out of other material don't give quite the same
pleasure. Is it all right to kill the animal to obtain the
extra pleasure that using a bat made out of its bone would
bring? Would it be morally more permissible if you could hire
someone to do the killing for you?)

Such
examples and questions might help someone to see what sore of line
he wishes to draw, what sort of position he wishes to take.
They face, however, the usual limitations of consistency
arguments; they do not say, once a conflict is shown, which view
to change. After failing to devise a principle to distinguish
swing­ing the bat from killing and eating an animal, you might
decide that it's really all right, after all, to swing the bat.
Furthermore, such appeal to similar cases does not greatly help us
to assign precise moral weight to different sorts of animals. (We
further discuss the difficulties in forcing a moral conclusion by
appeal to examples in Chapter 9.)

My purpose
here in presenting these examples is to pursue the notion of moral
side constraints, not the issue of eating animals. Though I should
say that in my view the extra benefits Americans today can gain
from eating animals do not justify doing it. So we
shouldn't. One ubiquitous argument, not unconnected with side
constraints, deserves mention: because people eat animals, they
raise more than otherwise would exist without this practice. To
exist for a while is better than never to exist at all. So (the
argument concludes) the animals are better off because we have the
prac­tice of eating them. Though this is not our object,
fortunately it turns out that we really, all along, benefit them!
(If tastes changed and people no longer found it enjoyable to eat
animals, should those concerned with the welfare of animals steel
themselves to an unpleasant task and continue eating them?) I
trust I shall not be misunderstood as saying that animals are to
be given the same moral weight as people if I note that the
parallel argument about people would not look very convincing. We
can imagine that pop­ulation problems lead every couple or group
to limit their children to some number fixed in advance. A given
couple, having reached the number, proposes to have an additional
child and dispose of it at the age of three (or twenty-three) by
sacrificing it or using it for some gastronomic purpose. In
justification, they note that the child will not exist at all
if this is not allowed; and surely it is bet­ter for it to exist
for some number of years. However, once a per­son exists, not
everything compatible with his overall existence being a net plus
can be done, even by those who created him. An existing person has
claims, even against those whose purpose in creating him was to
violate those claims. It would be worthwhile to pursue moral
objections to a system that permits parents to do anything whose
permissibility is necessary for their choosing to have the child,
that also leaves the child better off than if it hadn't
been
born.8 (Some will think the only objections arise from
dif­ficulties in accurately administering the permission.) Once
they exist, animals too may have claims to certain treatment.
These claims may well carry less weight than those of people. But
the fact that some animals were brought into existence only
because someone wanted to do something that would violate one of
these claims does not show that the claim doesn't exist at all.

Consider the
following (too minimal) position about the treat­ment of animals.
So that we can easily refer to it, let us label this position
"utilitarianism for animals, Kantianism for people." It says: (i)
maximize the total happiness of all living beings; (2) place
stringent side constraints on what one may do to human beings.
Human beings may not be used or sacrificed for the bene­fit of
others; animals may be used or sacrificed for the benefit of other
people or animals only if those benefits are greater than
the loss inflicted. (This inexact statement of the utilitarian
position is close enough for our purposes, and it can be handled
more easily in discussion.) One may proceed only if the total
utilitarian benefit is greater than the utilitarian loss inflicted
on the animals. This utilitarian view counts animals as much as
normal utilitarianism does persons. Following Orwell, we might
summarize this view as: all animals are equal but some are more
equal than others, (None may be sacrificed except for a
greater total benefit; but persons may not be sacrificed at all,
or only under far more stringent con­ditions, and never for the
benefit of nonhuman animals. I mean (i) above merely to exclude
sacrifices which do not meet the utilitar­ian standard, not to
mandate a utilitarian goal. We shall call this position negative
utilitarianism.)

We can now
direct arguments for animals counting for some­thing to holders of
different views. To the "Kantian" moral philos­opher who imposes
stringent side constraints on what may be done to a person, we can
say:

You
hold utilitarianism inadequate because it allows an individual to
be sacrificed to and for another, and so forth, thereby neglecting
the strin­gent limitations on how one legitimately may behave
toward persons. But could there be anything morally
intermediate between persons and stones, something without such
stringent limitations on its treatment, yet not to be treated
merely as an object? One would expect that by sub­tracting or
diminishing some features of persons, we would get this intermediate
sort of being. (Or perhaps beings of intermediate moral
status are gotten by subtracting some of our characteristics and
adding others very different from ours.)

Plausibly,
animals are the intermediate beings, and utilitarianism is the
intermediate position. We may come at the question from a slightly
different angle. Utilitarianism assumes both that happiness is all
that matters morally and that all beings are interchangeable. This
conjunc­tion does not hold true of persons. But isn't (negative)
utilitarianism true of whatever beings the conjunction does hold
for, and doesn't it hold for animals?

To the
utilitarian we may say:

If only the
experiences of pleasure, pain, happiness, and so on (and the
capacity for these experiences) are morally relevant, then animals
must be counted in moral calculations to the extent they do
have these capaci­ties and experiences. Form a matrix where the
rows represent alternative policies or actions, the columns
represent different individual organisms, and each entry
represents the utility (net pleasure, happiness) the policy will
lead to for the organism. The utilitarian theory evaluates each
policy by the sum of the entries in its row and directs us to
perform an action or adopt a policy whose sum is maximal. Each
column is weighted equally and counted once, be it that of a
person or a nonhuman animal. Though the structure of the view
treats them equally, animals might be less important in the
decisions because of facts about them. If animals have less
capacity for pleasure, pain, happiness than humans do, the ma­trix
entries in animals' columns will be lower generally than those in
people's columns. In this case, they will be less important
factors in the ultimate decisions to be made.

A
utilitarian would find it difficult to deny animals this kind of
equal consideration. On what grounds could he consistently
dis­tinguish persons' happiness from that of animals, to count
only the former? Even if experiences don't get entered in the
utility matrix unless they are above a certain threshold, surely
some animal ex­periences are greater than some people's
experiences that the utili­tarian wishes to count. (Compare an
animal's being burned alive unanesthetized with a person's mild
annoyance.)
Bentham, we may note, does count animals' happiness
equally in just the way we have explained.

Under
"utilitarianism for animals, Kantianism for people," animals will
be used for the gain of other animals and persons, but persons
will never be used (harmed, sacrificed) against their will, for
the gain of animals. Nothing may be inflicted upon persons for
the
sake of animals. (Including penalties for violating laws against
cruelty to animals?) Is this an acceptable consequence? Can't one
save 10,000 animals from excruciating suffering by inflicting some
slight discomfort on a person who did not cause the animals'
suf­fering? One may feel the side constraint is not absolute when
it is people who can be saved from excruciating suffering.
So perhaps the side contraint also relaxes, though not as much,
when animals' suffering is at stake. The thoroughgoing utilitarian
(for animals and for people, combined in one group) goes
further and holds that, ceteris paribus, we may inflict
some suffering on a person to avoid a (slightly) greater suffering
of an animal. This permissive principle seems to me to be
unacceptably strong, even when the purpose is to avoid greater
suffering to a person!

Utilitarian
theory is embarrassed by the possibility of utility monsters who
get enormously greater gains in utility from any sac­rifice of
others than these others lose. For, unacceptably, the theory seems
to require that we all be sacrificed in the monster's maw, in
order to increase total utility. Similarly if people are util­ity
devourers with respect to animals, always getting greatly
coun­terbalancing utility from each sacrifice of an animal, we may
feel that "utilitarianism for animals, Kantianism for people," in
requiring (or allowing) that almost always animals be sacrificed,
makes animals too subordinate to persons.

Since it
counts only the happiness and suffering of animals, would the
utilitarian view hold it all right to kill animals pain­lessly?
Would it be all right, on the utilitarian view, to kill people
painlessly, in the night, provided one didn't first announce it?
Utilitarianism is notoriously inept with decisions where the
number of persons is at issue. (In this area, it must be
conceded, eptness is hard to come by.) Maximizing the total
happiness requires con­tinuing to add persons so long as their net
utility is positive and is sufficient to counterbalance the loss
in utility their presence in the world causes others. Maximizing
the average utility allows a per­son to kill everyone else if that
would make him ecstatic, and so happier than average. (Don't say
he shouldn't because after his death the average would drop lower
than if he didn't kill all the others.) Is it all right to kill
someone provided you immediately substitute another (by having a
child or, in science-fiction fashion, by creating a full-grown
person) who will be as happy as the rest of the life of the person
you killed? After all, there would be no net diminution in total
utility, or even any change in its profile of distribution. Do we
forbid murder only to prevent feelings of worry on the part
of potential victims? (And how does a utilitarian explain what it
is they're worried about, and would he really base a policy on
what he must hold to be an irrational fear?) Clearly, a
utilitarian needs to supplement his view to handle such issues;
perhaps he will find that the supplementary theory becomes the
main one, relegating utilitarian considerations to a corner.

But isn't
utilitarianism at least adequate for animals? I think not. But if
not only the animals' felt experiences are relevant, what else is?
Here a tangle of questions arises. How much does an animal's life
have to be respected once it's alive, and how can we decide this?
Must one also introduce some notion of a nondegraded existence?
Would it be all right to use genetic-engineering tech­niques to
breed natural slaves who would be contented with their lots?
Natural animal slaves? Was that the domestication of ani­mals?
Even for animals, utilitarianism won't do as the whole story, but
the thicket of questions daunts us.